Two of South Africa's most famous archaeological sites, Sibudu and Blombos, have revealed that Middle Stone Age groups who lived in these different areas, more than 1 000 kilometres apart, used similar types of stone tools ...

A team of undergraduate researchers from Ithaca College traveled to Las Vegas to scan for subsurface cultural features at the Larder Site—an archaeological site occupied by Native Americans nearly 2,000 years ago —as ...

Archaeologists are avid users of social media, as well as online crowd-based funding and content-sourcing tools—deploying them to save sites, sustain the historic environment and protect history, often in the face of government ...

The paper on Zooarchaeology 'Livestock management in Spain from Roman to post-medieval times: a biometrical analysis of cattle, sheep/goat and pig' by the researcher of the Department of Geography, Prehistory and Archaeology ...

Analysis of ancient cadavers recovered at a famous archaeological site confirm the existence of a sophisticated culture of butchering and carving human remains, according to a team of scientists from the Natural History Museum, ...

Dozens of common plants are toxic. Archaeologists have long suspected that our Palaeolithic ancestors used plant poisons to make their hunting weapons more lethal. Now Dr Valentina Borgia has teamed up with a forensic chemist ...

Archaeology

Archaeology, archeology, or archæology (from Greek ἀρχαιολογία, archaiologia – ἀρχαῖος, archaīos, "primal, ancient, old"; and -λογία, -logia) is the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation, analysis, and interpretation of material remains and environmental data, including architecture, artifacts, features, biofacts, and landscapes. Because archaeology's aim is to understand humankind, it is a humanistic endeavor. Due to its analysis of human cultures, it is a subset of anthropology, which contains: physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. There is debate as to what archaeology's goals are. Some goals include the documentation and explanation of the origins and development of human cultures, understanding culture history, chronicling cultural evolution, and studying human behavior and ecology, for both prehistoric and historic societies[citation needed].

Archaeologists are also concerned with the study of methods used in the discipline, and the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings underlying the questions archaeologists ask of the past. The tasks of surveying areas in order to find new sites, excavating sites in order to recover cultural remains, classification, analysis, and preservation are all important phases of the archaeological process. Given the broad scope of the discipline, there is cross-disciplinary research in archaeology. It draws upon anthropology, history, art history, classics, ethnology, geography, geology, linguistics, physics, information sciences, chemistry, statistics, paleoecology, paleontology, paleozoology, paleoethnobotany, and paleobotany.